GasBuddy News Article

CleanTechnica
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Electric vehicle charge time may appear to be primarily a convenience issue, but fast charging makes a tremendous difference where practicality is concerned.

The Chevy Spark is reportedly being offered with a fast-charging option that will charge the vehicle in 20 minutes. Relatively fast charge times of 20 minutes mean that it is more feasible to recharge your electric vehicle in public if you are almost out of range.

The Chevy Spark electric vehicle can apparently charge to 80% of its capacity in 20 minutes with the fast-charging capability.

With recharge times holding back electric cars, it seems that it would be wise to standardize electric car batteries and design the cars so that a recharge station could simply remove the depleted battery and install one that's charged.

As the article states, "Many chargers are still designed for slow charging, as the fast-charging ones are larger, more powerful, and more expensive, but the ability of batteries themselves to charge faster has improved quite a bit."

People might put up with inconvenience if they save money. THAT is the argument being used to sell people on natural gas cars and trucks--its very inconvenient right now, takes longer to fill, has safety issues, and costs $11,000-$50,000 for a conversion. $11,000 is the extra cost for a new pickup truck--so you have to chew through a lot of fuel at $2.00 a GGE to make CNG a worthwhile option.

Electric? Filling up is always the weak point, but it is WAY CHEAPER to run than natural gas, propane, gasoline, diesel, or hydrogen. Forget all you know about how many dollars per gallon,. What you need to know is how many cents per mile it costs to run a vehicle. Here is a handy thing to remember: For the -distance- you can run on $5.00 of gasoline, in similar cars it would cost $3.50 for diesel, about $2.00 (with a huge up and down depending where and how) for CNG, and 80-90 cents worth of electricity. You do not want to know what hydrogen would really cost in the real world in a free unsubsidized market--just think 'clean but PRICEY'

20-30 minutes is about the minimum amount of time someone spends in a supermarket, or at a shopping mall, or at a hospital outpatients, or a doctor or dentist office, or dinner out, or out meeting friends, or just about 90% of all your real stops. So if it is easy to 'plug' in in a lot of useful places, well before a battery is fully flat--you might not even need that much time. If a container is 3/4 full, it needs less put into it than if its half full, or 1/4 full or empty.

Just think about it for a second. And that is with 'plug' charging. The 'next thing' close on the horizon is wireless proximity (induction) charging--you don't even need a plug. The technology has been in use for years for smaller devices; its just 'details' for vehicles, and the 'self-parking' technology that Ford and others use is the last major piece of the puzzle needed to adopt it. Having a smart phone that tells you/directs you to the closest charging point to your stop will make it all really simple.

Changing your thinking about HOW you go about things means that you might never waste 5 minutes of your time filling up at a station ever again. You car fills up or just 'tops up' without you being there, with or without a plug. When you come back, it is all ready for you.

Unless these charging stations are like a parking meter where you plug them with coins, who's paying for them and the electricity? All of us who patronize that facility, since they'll have to raise prices/rates to cover the cost. I don't want to pay for the electricity for someone rich enough to afford an impracticable overpriced vehicle that can only go 40 miles on a charge.